George Rochberg

George Rochberg (July 5, 1918 – May 29, 2005) was an American composer of contemporary classical music. Long a serial composer, Rochberg abandoned the technique after his teenage son died in 1964, saying it had proved inadequate to express his grief and was empty of expressive power. By the 1970s, Rochberg's use of tonal passages in his music had provoked controversy among critics and fellow composers. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania until 1983, Rochberg chaired its music department until 1968. He became the first Annenberg Professor of the Humanities in 1978.

Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Rochberg attended first the Mannes College of Music, where his teachers included George Szell and Hans Weisse, then the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Rosario Scalero and Gian Carlo Menotti. He served in the United States Army in the infantry during World War II. He was Jewish.

Rochberg chaired the music department at the University of Pennsylvania until 1968 and continued to teach there until 1983. In 1978, he was named the first Annenberg Professor of the Humanities.

He married Gene Rosenfeld in 1941, and had two children, Paul and Francesca. In 1964, his son died of a brain tumor.

Rochberg died in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 2005, aged 86. Most of his works are in the archive of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. Some can also be found in the Music Division of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Lincoln Center in New York City, the University of Pennsylvania, the Curtis Institute of Music, and the City University of New York.

A longtime exponent of serialism, Rochberg abandoned this compositional technique upon the death of his teenage son in 1964. He said he had found serialism expressively empty and that it had proved an inadequate means for him to express his grief and rage. By the 1970s, Rochberg had become controversial for the tonal passages in his music. His use of tonality first became widely known through the String Quartet No. 3 (1972), which includes a set of variations in the style of late Beethoven. Another movement of the quartet contains passages reminiscent of Gustav Mahler. This caused critics to classify him as a neoromantic composer. He compared atonality to abstract art and tonality to concrete art and compared his artistic evolution with the painter Philip Guston's, calling "the tension between concreteness and abstraction" a fundamental issue for both of them. His music has also been described as neoconservative postmodernism

Of the works Rochberg composed early in his career, his Symphony No. 2 (1955–56) stands out as one of the most accomplished serial compositions by an American composer. He is perhaps best known for his String Quartets Nos. 3–6 (1972–78). Rochberg conceived Nos. 4–6 as a set and named them the "Concord Quartets" after the Concord String Quartet, which premiered and recorded the works. No. 6 includes a set of variations on Pachelbel's Canon in D.

A few of his works were collages of quotations from other composers. "Contra Mortem et Tempus", for example, contains passages from Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Edgard Varèse and Charles Ives.